Parenting our Bee after infertility

You can tell from the lines on her face

That she’s been sleeping face down again. I battled with her for a few days when she started rolling over completely onto her tummy to go to sleep. Each time I flipped her over she would roar into life again and sob herself off to sleep, at which point I would go and sob in the shower, wondering why each nap needed to be such a mission to accomplish. At times we were spending 40 minutes to get her to go to sleep for 45 – really hardly worth it as she was still waking tired and rumpled.

Finally I realised that like most of the times I have felt frustration so far, it’s because I was trying to force her to do something that she didn’t need to do. My primary concern was SIDS, although the risk of that seems to peak between 2-4 months and she’s great with her head control now. So after checking it off with my Maternal Health nurse and Roo’s Mamma (the voice of experience with 2 kids of her own) I’ve made sure her cot is cleared, rigged up the movement function on our baby monitor and allowed her to go to sleep as she’d prefer. Just 5 minutes of self-settling and she’s off.

More remarkably, it seems also to be the solution to helping her settle again at the end of a sleep cycle; three times in the last few days she’s woken, moaned a bit and gone back to sleep, getting in a very restorative 2 hours nap in the morning. This has helped me feel more on top of things, as I get a lot of work done in that time. If only I could convince her to do the same in the arvo (although we tend to be out and about in the pram), I might be able to get a snooze in myself, which would be heaven.

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AM SO GLAD ITS NOT JUST ME! Although we have had a small measure of success today with the reintroduction of the swaddle for naps. First nap she mumbled happily to her mobile until she fell asleep, second nap she grizzled for about ten minutes, and has now been out for nearly an hour. Better than the 45 minutes of both of us crying to achieve a 20 minute sleep that we had been dealing with!